One of our MABL (Master of Arts in Biblical Languages) students is showing a set of skills I had heretofore not seen in full blossom–he’s very nearly a stand-up comedian! Today he passed along some language jokes that would make any elementary Greek and Hebrew professor very proud, and thankfully, he has permitted me to post them here. Enjoy! And if you don’t smile, then please take it as definitive proof that you *need* to come study Greek and Hebrew here at HBU! Merry Christmas!

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(1) Q: What kind of poker do Hebrew cowboys play?

A: Texas Cholem.

(2) Q: Where did extremely sick adjective go?

A: The adjectival intensive care unit. (He himself went, by the way.)

(3) Q: What Hebrew vowel is so rare it only occurs in texts once every 75 years?

A: Halley’s Qamets.

(4) Q: What kind of airplane do Greek pronouns fly in?

A: The Pronominal Concorde, of course.

(5) Q: Which Hebrew vowel has also starred in several extremely violent action movies?

A: Steven Segol.

(6) Q: What’s the best app for studying Greek grammar?

A: Angry Verbs.

(7) Q: Why do so many young Hebrew farmers move to the city after their first crop?

A: How can you keep them on the farm once they’ve seen פְּרִי?

(8) Q: How do you know you’ve been studying Greek too hard?

A: At Christmas you see “‘Tis the season” and start trying to parse the “τις”.

(9) Q: How are many aspiring comedy careers like tsere, qamets, and chireq?

From Language Log: Here’s an example of why it’s important to understand the basics of syntax, structural ambiguity, and proper punctuation. The first line of the New York Times piece has seemingly added to Mitterrand’s sins! Interesting commentary at the Language Log link’s combox. –psm

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“François Mitterrand crash blossom”

Under the heading “the benefits of paired em dashes, part 57″, Mark Swofford sent in the following screen shot from yesterday’s New York Times:

The main part of the caption under the most prominent photo in the screen shot reads:

“Mazarine Pingeot, the daughter of François Mitterrand, the former French president, and his longtime mistress, has published a diary.”

As Mark says, “It took me several readings before that stopped sounding incestuous.”

My friend, James Anderson (one of Reformed Theol. Seminary-Charlotte’s newest professors in philosophy), just posted a hysterically funny post on his blog about Twitter. He constructs 19 different types of arguments on why one should not tweet. Click here for a good chuckle. Bravo, James!

Update:

I’ve been inspired to provide one more argument against Twitter to add to James’ post:

Here’s a Wittgensteinian argument:

1. A word’s use determines its meaning.
2. I do not use Twitter.
3. Therefore, Twitter is meaningless.

Yes, I know, I know, this suffers from the fallacy of equivocation (due to differing senses of *use*). But, in satire, anything goes!